"I want to understand how collaboration when building a robot works."

"It's a lot like what we've been doing! Talking about what we're thinking, asking questions, coming up with ideas based on things the other said. But if you want to watch me work on it with Teddy instead of just hearing about it I can ask him for help again."

"Yes. Where and when will you do this?"

"It will depend on when he's available, but I'll ask him to come to the junkyard with me after school tomorrow, and if he says yes we can do it then."

There's a little gust that she'll recognize by now as pleased-agreement-rustle.

Awww. Well then!

The next day she passes Teddy a note in class again.

Don't freak out, but my friend wants to watch us work on spider-bot together. Can you come to the junkyard with me after school?

Uh... Why do they want that? I guess you might not know. You're pretty sure it's safe right? The junkyard i mean.

He clearly doesn't mean the junkyard.

They want to see us collaborate, since they've never done a robotics project with anybody but me before.

I've been going to the junkyard all the time for ages and never gotten hurt, I see no reason for anything bad to happen if you're reasonably careful.

...Alright then. I'll have to arrange a ride home after we're done in the junkyard unless you can find one for me, but I can do this. I'll probably ask your friend some stuff about their work.

Questions should be fine. I don't have a car but I can maaaybe get my dad to drive you home if we're there past when he gets off work. Probably best if you can find one yourself though, he works pretty late.

Okay sure. I'll figure out how to get my folks to pick me up. Worst case I'll call an Uber, this sounds interesting enough it'd be worth it.

Great, thank you!

And after school she will lead him toward the junkyard.

"I'm nervous. This is big stuff."

"It's okay to be nervous. I was nervous at first too. But you'll be fine."

"And I'll get to ask my list of questions. Hopefully."

"I bet you'll have a chance, we've got plenty of time."

The genie is in his favorite spot in the corner of the junkyard. The proprietor sees Margaret, doesn't seem to care that she's bringing a friend, and goes back to his reading.

"Hello! This is Teddy, he said it's okay if you watch us collaborate."

"Yes," the genie intones, "I will watch."

"Okay. So... What are you having trouble with? The motors?"

"Yeah, I'm doing what I thought you suggested but I might have misunderstood you, because I'm getting weird feedback . . . "

"Well, steppers can do that. Let's take a look-"

He keeps nervously glancing at the little cloud of dust that is the genie, who is being quieter than usual today.

Margaret mostly interacts directly with Teddy, but makes her thought process more explicit and narrates what she's doing a lot more than she would if he was the only other person there.

They figure out what's wrong with the motors eventually - cheap controller chips skipping around a lot and not playing well with fast changes to the input and instructions. "So you could either work around it, make the input switching slower - these are already working and it'd take a while to tear them out, find better ones, put them in. Or if it's absolutely essential for the legs to respond that quickly, maybe go with an Ebbor T300 series controller and see how that works?"

"I'm not sure I want to buy a set of T300s for this, they only need to be that fast for jumps I can't reliably pull off the joystick moves for. And I've seen a couple nightmare reviews of Ebbor taking months to ship things. I'll rewire it to handle the chips it's got."

"You'll have to build the delay into the controls for best results. It's really the going back-and-forth that's hurting you. I think these will respond to changes alright, just not more than two or three a second..."

They keep talking about that for a while.

Eventually, Teddy tells the genie, "I want to ask you some questions."

The genie doesn't answer.

"...Is that okay?"

"Yes. I understand that the cost for observing you here is answering some questions."

"...Alright then."

He has a notebook of questions about wishes. The ones about how a genie does this or that magic thing are invariably answered by some variation of 'I just do it'. The ones about whether a given wish could be fulfilled in multiple ways go a little better - some ways of fulfilling some wishes are 'easier' and the genie will always go for the laziest option unless told not to. It'll quite happily compare what wishes are harder or easier than others, though, and how much of a favor it would be willing to do various wishes for, and Teddy gets a new set of data out of it.